Milbank Represents Dealer Managers in Verizon’s Record-Breaking $13.3B and Novel £694.8M Exchange Offers

Thursday, September 4, 2014
Tags:  Milbank LLP

Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP announced that it has represented the dealer managers in a pair of private exchange offers conducted by Verizon Communications Inc., one of which is the largest debt exchange offer on record.  The transactions allow Verizon to take advantage of the current low interest rates and low borrowing costs while also extending and spreading out the maturity of its debt.

In the first transaction, Verizon accepted for exchange a total of £554.2 million of sterling denominated existing debt securities and issued a total of £694.8 million in new debt securities.  The dealer managers were led by Credit Suisse Securities (Europe).

In the second transaction, Verizon completed the largest debt exchange offer on record by accepting for exchange a combined total of $10.9 billion across 11 series of existing debt securities and issued a total of $13.3 billion in new debt securities.  The dealer managers were led by Citigroup Global Markets, J.P. Morgan Securities and UBS Securities.

Milbank’s deal team was led by Global Securities partners Paul Denaro and Stuart Morrissy.  Milbank has also represented the underwriters in Verizon’s $49 billion bond sale, the largest corporate debt offering on record, to fund the company’s purchase of Vodafone Group PLC’s interest in Verizon Wireless.
Also working on the transactions were London-based Alternative Investments partner James Warbey and New York-based Tax partner Andrew Walker, along with New York-based Global Securities associates Sam Badawi, John Ablan and Max Weiss and Tax associate Erika Hauser.

“We are proud to have advised such a distinguished group of financial institutions and created innovative pricing structures for exchange offers of an unprecedented size.” Mr. Denaro said.

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